Nigerian leaders failed to stay true to democratic vision, Jinadu

Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Adele Jinadu, in this interview with MUYIWA ADEYEMI, discussed how to address the multiple challenges facing Nigeria, the leadership recruitment process and how to secure the electoral system.

How would you describe the federal structure and the multiple challenges that are holding back Nigeria's progress? We must avoid being ensnared by design fetishism, especially constitutional design fetishism, implicit in the faith placed, for example, in true federalism or Restructuring, as a solution, implies the solution conclusion to the problem of democracy and federalism in our country. Yes, constitutional design or restructuring matters, can make a difference, and matters, contrary to Alexander Pope's assumption that “For forms of government, let fools argue. What is administered best is best."

The emerging picture of the country's democratic struggle against colonial rule, particularly against the Richards Constitution of 1947, which set the regional mold for the transmutation of regionalism into ethnoregional and then ethnofederalism in the country, shows that, for the leadership of the anti-colonial democratic struggle, constitutional design is important and can make a difference in the character, structure and processes of democratic rule in the country. Since independence, the detailed analysis of the Report of the Constitution Drafting Committee in 1976, the Report of the Political Bureau of 1986, and the constitutional conferences and constituent assemblies consecutive to each of them, held in 1978, 1986 and 1999 to produce the 1979, 1989, and 1999, unmistakably express a preference for an ethnofederal political system, under limited constitutional government, broadly defined by the rule of law.

But it is not a question of affirming that there is a real democracy and a real federalism, as the notion of ethnofederalism as a species of its kind, federalism, suggests. The Federal Idea, as a universal, Ideal Form, must be separated from its empirical manifestations and representations. This is explained by the constraints imposed on the designers of these federal representations and on those who make them work, in particular the political class, the public authorities and the institutions of the State and society, by their background, the quality of the materials with whom they work and the environment, in short, the accumulation of the socio-cultural environment in which they evolve.

In short, what we need to illuminate are the contradictions engendered by the political economy within which we have practiced our variant of democracy and federalism since independence. It is easy but analytically pointless to blame the Constitution. The much more difficult task is to shine a spotlight on the contradictions that cause the Constitution to not work as it is designed and should work. The larger picture that emerges for me, from the spotlight on the contradictions, is that the serious and deep fault lines in our practice of democracy and ethno-federalism since independence remain the failure of competitive parties and the electoral politics to serve as a loop that firmly secures and reinforces the interdependent process of nation building and state formation through the strengthening of democratic institutions in the country. This is the central challenge of federalism in our country

Will you say democracy works in Nigeria? The question is not whether democracy, including ethno-federalism, works in Nigeria. Democratic and federal politics everywhere are inherently in a state of perpetual crisis because of their unfulfilled promises, their "mixture of hope and dissatisfaction, their spotlighting of a hope that will never come true." , to use O'Donnell's formulation of the “perpetual crises of democracy” and the revolution of growing expectations that arise from them from time to time. Moreover, the very notion of democratic and federal politics is contested because it is loaded with values, on which we can seldom achieve consensus or intersubjective agreement on why it works or does not work well, its strengths and its weaknesses. There is an ebb and flow in the workings of political systems because there are politically salient issues that push or militate against consensus politics, if there ever was, or if there could be. have a. The "weight of the past" blurs the direction and solution of current problems, as does the convergence of the structure of regional and global politics with domestic politics.

But I find the most problematic contradictions in our Democratic and federal politics in the larger picture that emerges in my attempt to understand and explain it, in the following complex combination of (a) the persistence of an anti-democratic political and legal culture, which is anchored on (b) a political economy of loot capitalism in which the principal...